Mr. Miller was born at Cromarty, of humble but respectable parents, whose history would have possessed no inconsiderable interest, even if it had not derived one of a higher kind from the genius and fortunes of their child. By the paternal side he was descended from a race of sea-faring people, whose family burying-ground, if we judge from the past, seems to be the sea. Under its green waves his father sleeps: his grandfather, his two granduncles, one of whom sailed round the world with Anson, lie also there; and the same extensive cemetery contains the relics of several of his more distant relatives. His father was but an infant of scarcely a year old, at the death of our author’s grandfather, and had to commence life as a poor ship-boy; but such was the energy of his mind, that, when little turned of thirty, he had become the master and owner of a fine large sloop, and had built himself a good house, which entitled his son to the franchise on the passing of the Reform Bill. Having unfortunately lost his sloop in a storm, he had to begin the world anew, and he soon became master and owner of another, and would have thriven, had he lived; but the hereditary fate was too strong for him, and when our author was a little boy of five summers, his father’s fine new sloop foundered at sea in a terrible tempest, and he and his crew were never more heard of. Mr. Miller had two sisters younger than himself, both of whom died ere they attained to womanhood. His mother experienced the usual difficulties which a widow has to encounter in the decent education of her family; but she struggled honestly and successfully, and ultimately found her reward in the character and fame of her son. It is from this excellent woman that Mr. Miller has inherited those sentiments and feelings which have given energy to his talents as the defender of revealed truth, and the champion of the Church of his fathers. She was the great granddaughter of a venerable man, still well known to tradition in the north of Scotland as Donald Roy of Nigg,—a sort of northern Peden, who is described in the history of our Church as the single individual who, at the age of eighty, when the presbytery of the district had assembled in the empty church for the purpose of inducting an obnoxious presentee, had the courage to protest against the intrusion, and to declare “that the blood of the people of Nigg would be required at their hands, if they settled a man _to the walls_ of that church.” Tradition has represented him as a seer of visions, and a prophesier of prophecies; but whatever credit may be given to stories of this kind, which have been told also of Knox, Welsh, and Rutherford, this ancient champion of Non-Intrusion was a man of genuine piety, and the savor of his ennobling beliefs and his strict morals has survived in his family for generations. If the child of such parents did not receive the best education which his native town could